Keon McGuire has no actual attachment to Bill Cosby or his landmark present.
As a black man, he’s conscious of the sitcom’s place in popular culture, however he was barely in elementary faculty when The Cosby Show went off the air. Years later, he largely tuned Cosby out after a broadly panned speech to the NAACP in 2004, when the star ranted about black moms, clothes decisions and language.
“That for me was kind of an emotional — I won’t say reckoning — but it made me reposition how I felt about Bill Cosby as this figure within the larger representation of black leadership,” mentioned McGuire, a 32-year-old training professor at Arizona State University.
McGuire’s mindset displays a broader generational divide over Cosby, who’s scheduled to be sentenced Monday in a Philadelphia courtroom for drugging and molesting a girl. The sentence — something from probation to 30 years in jail — will mark the ultimate chapter of the 81-year-old entertainer’s resounding fall from grace.
Those who grew up viewing Cosby’s NBC present wrestle to reconcile the conviction with the clever, heat tv father they knew. But many millennials see him as long-irrelevant determine, and the #MeToo period has forged him as somebody who was deservingly vanquished, like so many different misbehaving males in energy.
“The generational gap plays a huge role in the contrasting, at times conflicting, views of Cosby’s cultural importance,” mentioned Michael Eric Dyson, a sociologist at Georgetown University. “Those of us who are older have memories of Cosby as a cultural ambassador, a black icon and an American hero.”
Jon Francois, a 26-year-old radio deejay in Lyndonville, Vermont, was too younger to have grown up with “The Cosby Show.” But he grew to become a fan as a baby when he discovered his dad and mom watching reruns on cable. He didn’t see it as a rarity till he later in contrast the present to older sitcoms that depicted the black expertise as extra decrease class. Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable was a physician and his spouse, Clair, a lawyer in New York City.
“It wasn’t until I got older and kind of studied ‘The Cosby Show,’ that I realized ‘Oh hey, this was a groundbreaking thing to have a black family portrayed like this as upper middle class.’”
When sexual assault allegations began to floor in opposition to Cosby in giant numbers, Francois mentioned, youthful kinfolk have been extra goal about it. The claims by girls have been an excessive amount of to disregard. But his mom and aunt had the toughest time believing the accusations.
“They were still stapled on the idea of Bill Cosby, the man they enjoyed and loved so much on TV, America’s dad, that they just didn’t really want to acknowledge the fact that he’s an alleged rapist,” Francois mentioned.
An underlying difficulty is the dearth of humanizing portrayals of African-Americans in widespread media, he added.
“If anything, that’s a serious indictment on the culture, that someone would feel losing Cosby is losing a positive representation of black folks,” he mentioned.
The whole ordeal leaves him with blended feelings — largely unhappiness and disappointment.
“If all this sexual assault stuff didn’t happen, he could have retired and went off into the sunset and had this great legacy left behind as a groundbreaking comedian-actor who paved the way for so many African-Americans,” Francois mentioned. “It’s so surreal even now he’s being convicted.”
